I've known Rick Santorum for 22 years, having first met him in 1990 before he'd won his first campaign for Congress. I interviewed him on WORD-FM, an evangelical Christian radio station where I was a frequent guest host (and eventually a full-time host) early in his campaign.

If I was not the first media personality to interview Rick, I was one of the first. I had Rick as a guest at the request of my friend, Mark Rogers, who was running Rick's campaign. Over the years I interviewed Rick at least a dozen times and debated him several times as well. I personally knew most of his staff, almost hired one member of his staff as the research director of a think tank I ran, and eventually did hire another of his staff members as my administrative assistant.

As I mentioned before, I was friends with the man who ran his first campaign and who ended up being Rick's chief of staff when Rick was in Congress. I was best man at the marriage of a Santorum staff member and one of my closest friends. This couple may well be my wife’s and my closest friends. I’ve had dealings on more than one occasion with a media/public relations firm run by John Brabender, who has done most of Rick's media campaign work.

In addition to this, I've interviewed Karen Santorum twice, once on radio and once in person on Cornerstone Television. In short, I would say that I know Rick well through direct interaction and through his staff, in support of, and then in opposition in the form of a series of public debates about a tax increase which Rick was inexplicably pushing on the confused people of Western Pennsylvania. As a conservative radio talk show host in Rick's 'home' town; I found myself defending him on many occasions, less and less enthusiastically as Rick managed to alienate the citizens of Pennsylvania by wider and wider margins.

I haven't written any articles about Santorum's presidential bid, until now. He was no longer my business. And I resisted the urge this election season to tell fellow Republicans around the United States about Rick, because I figured they would find out soon enough, and because I had several businesses to run and did not need the distraction.

And then Rick made himself my business. On Sunday, Santorum lashed out at my friend and colleague Terry Madonna. Terry is a highly regarded political pollster and host of a show which is produced by Newsmakers Leadership Group, a firm which I founded and chair, and that is run by my wife. Santorum was asked by Fox News about a recent report which came out of Dr. Madonna's polling firm, which showed that Santorum's lead in Pennsylvania had shrunk to only 2 points.

When my son, Christopher, who is the producer of Terry's show, read the quote to me I blurted out this statement, "Rick makes things up." The more I thought about it, the more clear it was to me that Santorum's main problem (and there are many) is as simple as that: he does not tell the truth. He makes things up as he goes along, assuming no one will check. When the people of Pennsylvania figured that out, they were done with him and fired him as their Senator, and Rick even lied about that.

The first big lie Santorum ever told me was in 1997. Santorum was one of the leaders of a group that was pushing for a regional tax hike which would be used to fund a large stimulus program. The plan was called the Regional Renaissance Initiative and it was chaired by a business executive who, along with his wife, was also one of Santorum's earliest and largest financial contributors.

The plan was to create a multi-government authority which would take the new tax money and use it to attract state and federal tax money in various matching programs. The chief projects were a tax funded baseball park, football stadium and convention center. The main political sponsor was Pittsburgh's Democratic mayor, Tom Murphy. The main business sponsor was the Allegheny Conference, a group representing large corporations which had a history of support for tax hikes, urban renewal and various other government-centered development projects.

I debated Santorum several times on TV and in person on this topic. He, and his team, asserted the typical Keynesian arguments about public works projects. They trotted out studies from local groups which used Keynesian multiplier models to argue that this government spending would more than pay for itself in economic development. They argued, much like the supporters of Obama's government stimulus programs do, that this spending program would be a jobs generator.

Santorum added some odd cultural arguments, claiming that a tax-funded stadium would be 'like an old-fashioned Amish barn raising'. I led the opposition to the plan, arguing that whatever alleged multipliers Rick and his allies could reasonably suggest would flow in a positive way from the spending, they would be more than offset by the negative multipliers of the tax hikes, and that barn raisings, unlike taxes, were voluntary.